Can OSI specify that public domain is open source?

[Thorsten Glaser]

> From: John Cowan <cowan <at> mercury.ccil.org>
> Subject: Re: Can OSI specify that public domain is open source?
> Newsgroups: gmane.comp.licenses.open-source.general
> Date: 2011-09-07 23:12:40 GMT (2 minutes ago)
> Expires: This article expires on 2011-09-22

Why do these postings expire, anyway? This should all be archived IMHO.

John Cowan <cowan <at> mercury.ccil.org> writes:

> So if Aunt Alice wrote a book in 1890 (to put it safely beyond the
> reach of U.S. copyright), and Bob translated it today into German, the
> copyright would belong to Bob, and whoever he licensed would have a
> valid license.

Hm, so translating into another language is enough? (That is not a big
problem in the IT realm…)